Music Reviews

ZZ Top's third, released July, 1973 was the group's breakthrough set, peaking at #8 on the crowded Billboard Top 200. "Boogie-Rock", flavored with Southern Memphisonian (is there such a word?) blues charm produced a unique blend of pulsating rhythmic drive and country charm . Perhaps that's why all these years later the album continues to find new audiences wanting to both "boogie down" and draw close to the southern ether. It's... Read More

Thelonious Alone in San Francisco is the middle of Thelonious Monk’s three solo-piano albums and, to my mind, the most satisfying. It was recorded over two days in October 1959 during his first trip to the Bay Area, where he’d been lured to play sets at the Black Hawk jazz club. Orrin Keepnews, his producer at Riverside Records, Monk’s label at the time, happened to be on the West Coast, so they decided to spend some of their free time making this album. Maybe San... Read More

This album, available on April 18th as a Record Store Day special, is interesting and worthy of your attention on many levels beyond the music, which of course is the main attraction. First, it was co-produced by Charles Tolliver in 1968, 3 years before he and Stanley Cowell founded Strata-East Records. So clearly this was an independently produced project, though Tolliver's new annotation for this "full circle" Strata-East release doesn't provide... Read More

Courtney Barnett is an Australian national treasure. The singer-songwriter’s musical style places the listener within her wandering stream of consciousness, unsheathing layers of raw vulnerability and playful wit. Her 10+ year career isn’t limited to several full-length studio efforts. It also includes a handful of EPs, an instrumental ambient film score, and a collaborative album with Philadelphia’s ‘constant hitmaker’ Kurt Vile. Creature of Habit isn’t only the... Read More

It’s always interesting to see how bands grow up, especially a band whose younger work is as juvenile as Blink-182’s. In this case, drummer Travis Barker is now dating a Kardashian, bassist/co-frontman Mark Hoppus seems to have a fairly normal existence podcasting and working on other bands’ records, and guitarist/other co-frontman Tom DeLonge co-founded To The Stars, a company dedicated to multimedia investigation and promotion of ufology, for which he has directed... Read More

From the moment Queen broke onto the music scene in the early 1970s, they were almost light-years ahead of their contemporaries. Their own brand of ‘regal rock’ was fearless, testing the boundaries of recording technology by layering harmonies and instrumentation. As if their self-titled debut from 1973 was a raucous slab that honed in on Queen’s initial hard rock foundation, the follow-up would become a major sonic leap. Queen II, released in March 1974, was as far... Read More

Songs for Swingin’ Lovers is the second in Blue Note’s Tone Poet series of new vinyl remasterings that I hope will eventually include all sixteen concept albums for Capitol Records that Frank Sinatra recorded between 1953 and 1962. His fourth album[1] after signing with the label in 1953, it followed Songs for Young Lovers and Swing Easy! (both 1954) and In the Wee Small Hours (1955). Like Wee Small Hours, it became a landmark in Sinatra’s career as entertainer,... Read More

In collaboration with The Vinyl Factory, OJAS Music aims to bring a new kind of music into your listening room: minimalist, experimental, neo-classical and truly audiophile. The Deep Listen. It's punching all the buzzword buttons, but how does this first release stack up?

Includes a brief survey of early and notable works combining acoustic instruments with taped and live electronics, and recorded/sampled elements - similar to procedures used on this album.

Also includes details of upcoming live shows by Michael A. Muller, including at Common Wave Hi-Fi in Los Angeles this Thursday, April 2nd.

Throughout the past few years here at the Tracking Angle, Mark, Paul, and myself have covered a wide breadth of the audiophile classical reissues coming to the market. Inevitably, a few of them have drawn comparisons to what we often claim are the gold standards of orchestral recording: RCA "Living Stereo". When you think about “Audiophile Classical”, these records are what spring to mind thanks to the legacy of writers such as Harry Pearson and Sid Marks.... Read More

A buddy of mine sent me “Trinidad” when it leaked last summer. I should’ve loved it. There’s feedback, there are horns. And there’s this kid who sounds like a trombone waking up in the morning. Cameron Winter’s voice is a wiley, unpredictable instrument. Who – or what – is responsible for this? Having Television, Radiohead, and Ween on the same iPod as a thirteen-year-old? It’s either an instant turn-off or a temporary one. I tapped out after a minute-and-a-half.

Before getting to the music, here are the mysteries: the first is that though the insert shows the Ampex 499 master tape box in full sized glory with an orange sticker indicating it was baked on July 24th 2017 (as best as I can make the date out) and the 30IPS tapes are fully assembled side A and B reels, this reissue was cut from a high resolution digital file. Why? The Capitol "UDiscovermusic" website says that all records in the Vinylphyle series are cut... Read More

Ozzy Osbourne’s departure from Black Sabbath in 1979 was a catastrophic event for any metalhead. It was a long time coming, between his excessive drug/alcohol abuse and a growing disinterest in the group’s material. Ronnie James Dio, who had just fronted the first three albums of Ritchie Blackmore’s Rainbow, became the next and second-highest-regarded vocalist for the godfathers of metal. Whereas Osbourne simply followed the melody of Tony Iommi’s guitar riffs, Dio’s... Read More

A defining musical moment for me was sitting down with high school friends after hitting Blockbuster and watching Scorsese's concert epic "The Last Waltz." Of course, my favorite moment was witnessing a visibly gacked out Neil Young amble onto the stage and slide into "Helpless" and watching Danko and Robertson searching the skies for those birds flying across the sky. But when Joni appears, she is truly resplendent cradling a beautiful old... Read More

Hailing from the Great White Northern city of Toronto, Rush was one of those bands that never grandfathered themselves into one specific style. Whether it was the ‘Canadian Zeppelin’ aesthetic of their early years, crafting side-long progressive epics well into the ‘70s, or streamlining into the ‘80s with more commercial approaches, the group grew alongside their devoted audience. By 1984, the indicators of Rush’s musical evolution became more radical. Synthesizers... Read More

You license a title at 45rpm (because that's what's offered) and then the licensor releases it at 33 1/3 around the same time. These things happen. And they happen with greater frequency now. Now that vinyl has become a "thing". There was a time that the labels really didn't care much about the format and freely licensed titles to the reissue labels like Classic Records, Acoustic Sounds and the others. And they let the tapes out of the vaults.... Read More

Like its namesake, it appears that the movie "Abandoned Heights" will also be abandoned or already has been. It's been listed as being in "pre-production" on IMDB since 2022, but no matter! If Jack Bruce could write a "Theme for an Imaginary Western", it's not a problem for John McLaughlin to write an entire film score for a movie he's never seen and perhaps will never will see. Usually film scores are written to picture,... Read More

For any readers who are pressed for time - buy this record. The only category of readers who should think twice are ‘people who do not like Autechre’, and the parallel category of ‘people who do not like acoustic guitar music’, because Autechre Guitar is precisely that, nothing more, nothing less. If you have no money right now, begin saving, otherwise, buy this now. If you have a few moments, and you would like to know why you should own this remarkable LP - read... Read More

It's been almost forty years since the late summer of 1988 release of this ethereal, ambient/experimental studio creation—the follow up to Talk Talk's two million seller The Colour of Spring—that flopped commercially but resulted in an almost cult-like following of fans who for decades have spread the word about its intense, almost hypnotically musical powers. The Colour of Spring's commercial success gave the group's leader Mark Hollis the... Read More